Legal Holds Overview
Team admins can use legal holds to monitor content that’s been created or modified by members of their team. Placing a legal hold on a team member supports data governance. It allows admins to view and export all the content that’s been created or modified by that member. In this video, we’ll learn about what legal holds are, how to use them, and how they might be useful to your company.
What are legal holds and how to use them?
Hi, my name is Harry, and I'm an implementation architect here at Dropbox. Today, I'm going to give a brief overview of what legal holds are in the context of Dropbox, why they might be useful for your company, and a quick demo of how to use them within the Dropbox admin console.
Before I explain why legal holds might be useful, let's start with a brief overview of what legal holds are. In Dropbox, a legal hold is a snapshot of data that a user or multiple users have shared, created, or modified over a certain period within Dropbox.
Now, why might legal holds be useful for you? There are two main reasons:
Defining Data Rules: Legal holds help establish rules for saving, accessing, and sharing data within Dropbox. This allows you to craft and enforce specific data management rules as needed.
Preventing Improper Usage: They help prevent improper usage of data within Dropbox. This can be crucial for ensuring that sensitive content is not mishandled or shared either intentionally or unintentionally, reducing the risk to your organization.
Now, let's move on to the demo section.
In the Dropbox admin console, navigate to the "Settings" section, where you'll find a "Data Governance" section with the legal holds feature.
Within the legal holds feature, you'll see two tabs: "Active" and "Released." The "Active" tab lists your current active legal holds, while the "Released" tab contains holds you no longer need.
To create a new legal hold, click the "Create New Hold" button. Give it a name, provide a description for context, and specify the user(s) you want to place on hold. You can add up to a hundred members per hold.
You can set a start date, and optionally, an end date. The start date can be retroactive, capturing data from a specific point in the past up to the present or indefinitely. Click "Continue" to proceed.
You can create an export of the content within the legal hold. You can choose to export all versions or specific types of files. Once you create the export, you'll be notified when it's ready for download.
You can also create a summary, which generates an Excel sheet with file names and metadata, and stores it in your Dropbox folder.
To release a legal hold, click the "Release Hold" button. This will delete any exports or data associated with the hold, but note that the end date specified in the hold will still be honored.
Remember, users placed on a legal hold are not notified, and it doesn't disrupt their normal Dropbox usage. The hold starts immediately upon creation and cannot be edited once activated. Legal holds do not consume extra space until you start exporting content.
Legal holds do not track Dropbox Paper documents, cloud content from services like Microsoft or Google Docs, or files accessed but not created or edited by the held user.
I hope this overview and demo of legal holds in Dropbox have been helpful. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Dropbox representative. Thank you for watching.